Posted by Daniel

One of my brothers is also a car fanatic like me but he is actually making a living working on cars. He is in Romania now and we spend a lot of time on Messenger exchanging URLs and pictures about everything that has wheels and it can be driven.

Yesterday I was browsing The Driver's Seat on MSNBC.com and I thought that one of the stories was pretty funny: Turkey cars: Great pictures of un-great cars. I really wanted to tell my brother that how I feel about the Aztek and here are the steps what I usually do to get the conversation started:

• open the Messenger's main window
• find my brother in the buddy list
• start a conversation
• copy the URL from the browser
• paste the URL in the conversation window
• send the message

But now it's a lot easier because MSNBC.com has a new feature called "IM This":

• click IM This - at the bottom of the article
  
• double click my brother's email in the "Select a Contact" dialog

Then he receives an invitation to join the "MSNBC.com Shared IM News" activity.

I love this new feature and it would be great if more news sites would implement it. But there is room for improvement and I have some suggestions:

• it would be nice if the activity window would support shared, in-place navigation
• don't send another invite when the activity is already open and I "IM This" another story to the same person

Now I'm ready to order an orange "IM This!" t-shirt I designed myself: